Car Shops #1 Flat Car Project

I made a little progress on my little scratch building project last night and have a photo album up on TrainLife detailing progress (click here to see, it should be visible to non members as well). I got the top and sides done last night, all that’s left is truck mounting, coupler box mounting, end pieces, and then detailing (grab irons, rivets, and paint).

I even mocked it up on some borrowed trucks (I’ve yet to pick up the set I’m going to use) and a piece of styrene to get the height correct:

Missabe Model Ideas

I was browsing the Missabe Railroad Historical Society website the other day and found a couple of really cool prototypes that would make some interesting scratch building projects.

What really draws me to these items is the uniqueness most of them have. Many of the items I’ve listed below appear to be old ore cars being reused for new tasks which I think is really cool.

Car Shops Flat Car – MRHS Link

Photo Copyright Doug Buell

This is something I’m going to try and model (which is why  I’ve posted a picture rather than just linking). It appears to me that it’s the remnants of a ore hopper putting it at about 22′. I’m really excited about the idea of building one of these but I have yet to decided how to start.

One obvious advantage to this project is that no lettering is needed!

Tie Car #6352 – MRHS Link

This is another project I’m going to try and model. I already have some flat cars that I once tried doing a custom paint job on that I have lined up to be made into Missabe flats. Other than paint and decals (available through the MRHS) all that I’d have to build is the end racks

Sand Cars – W-24158, W-24187, W-24456, and W-24899

This projects would likely make the most sense to do as kitbashes on ore cars (old MDC kits are fairly easy to find online). I’ll have to some more research if/when I get around to it but it appears from a glance that I would basically need to build covers for ore cars.

Decals

Ballast Cars - W-1410, W-1460, W-1465, W-1494, W-24350 and W-32675

These would be a little bit more difficult to build but it might be feasible to kitbash ore car models since they appear to be retrofits of old ore cars.

Decals

Scale Test Cars – W-32499 and W-132499

These cars could easily be kitbashes as well as they appear to be plated over ore cars. Since they are basically just boxes on wheels it might be just as easy to scratch build them.

Ore Test Cars - MRHS Link

What interests me in these is the uniqueness of it. The Missabe was testing three different air-operated dumping doors from different manufacturers and painted the three test cars different colors to easily tell which is which.

RDC-3

As regular readers may know I recently picked up a nice brass RDC on a trade. My original plan was to model it after the Missabe’s only RDC but after a lot of research I decided that with a nice brass model like that I was going to do it up the best I could and try to be as prototypically accurate as I could (which is why I’m taking that RDC and modeling it as the Budd demostrator).

I still have a lot of interest in doing the Missabe RDC if I find a good accurate model to start with

Decals #1 and decals #2

Water tower project

My oldest son wanted me to build a water tower on my current free-mo module and as luck would have it I found a Railtown spherical water tower kit (Walthers link) at the local hobby store with a blinking light. The two of us put it together and at my son’s request we painted it a light blue. He wants me to put a stripe around the center of it but other wise it’s basically finished.

And another shot testing the light before paint (it blinks but it’s hard to capture that in a still photo, it was actually fairly lucky I caught it on in both photos)

I’ll post more pictures when I get around to finishing the paint job.

RDC 2960

I took a little time today to do a little work on my RDC project. As I’d mentioned earlier I’m taking a brass RDC-1 and decorating it in its demonstrator scheme. Unfortunately I was unable to find any decals in HO scale for the demonstrator scheme so I’m working on creating my own. It’s a fairly simple scheme and I think I’ve gotten it pretty close.

This is just printed on regular paper and rather roughly cut. It looks like I’m getting close, just need to center the logo a bit more and make it a little wider. Then I just have to get some decal paper and print it up along with some numbers.

Speed Matching Tips and Tricks Part 2

In my last post I wrote about some observations I’ve made in my experiences using the Bachrus Speedometer to do speed matching. This time I’m going to describe the steps I go through for my locomotives.

I start by setting up a spreadsheet to keep track of the speed table in scale miles per hour that will be used to map the CV values to actual speeds. It would look something like this (completely made up numbers):

Speed Step	Scale Speed	Loco 1	Loco 2
1	2	15	18
2	4	20	23
3	6	25	28
…	…	…	…
28	56	100	105

The first column is the speed step as it maps to the actual CVs, the second column is the target scale speed. Then there is a column for each locomotive that is going to use this table. The values correspond to the CV values that result in the desired scale speed.

To get these values I start with a locomotive and put it on the speedometer, before I start figuring out CV values I run it for a while on the rollers to make sure the motor and drive train are warmed up. Once I’m ready to start I use JMRI and OPS mode programming to set all of the speed steps to the same value which should be relatively close to the target speed (largely a guess) and then I take a throttle and set it to the maximum speed and adjust the steps until it matches the target speed. At this point the speed table is flat.

Next I pick the next speed and move adjust every step except the first one until I find the second step. I basically repeat this for each step, leaving each find value in as I go so by the end you’ve got your full table. I also copy this to information to my spreadsheet as I go for safe keeping.

Once you have more than one item set up you can start testing them together. You’ll want to pay attention to the acceleration and deceleration programmed into the decoder, if you find a locomotive behaves differently going in reverse you can tweak the forward and reverse trim and if a locomotive just needs a little help getting started you can program in some kick-start.

Speed Matching Tips and Tricks

I’ve been watching the statistics on what’s driving traffic to my blog and noticed a lot of it is searches for Bachrus and/or JMRI so I thought I’d post an update.

There are three components I use in speed matching, the Bachrus Speedometer, JMRI, and a Digitrax PR3. As I have now successfully matched three very different locomotives from three different manufactures with three different decoders I have some tips and tricks.

1. A good drive train can make all the difference. My Kato SD38-2 and Proto 2000 SD60 were very easy to speed match as they run well at low speeds and across the range are smooth runners. My Athearn SD45T-2 however has been a bit tougher, it varies quite a bit even at constant voltage so it can be frustrating maintaining constant speeds to set up your speed table.The takeaway here is that the easy of matching can vary quite a bit between locomotives so don’t give up if things aren’t going smoothly.
2. If you are using a Digitrax PR3 and JMRI keep the PR3 plugged in to the USB port even when not in use. This solves two problems I’ve run into, first it helps ensure that the correct driver is always loaded and second it ensures the COM port assigned is the same.At least on Windows 7 I’ve observed that in some cases plugging in the PR3 will cause Windows to load a generic USB to Serial driver which will not work.If Windows assigns a different COM port to the PR3 or Bachrus Speedometer JMRI won’t function until you open it, fix the COM port assignment and restart the app. While this is simple it’s tedious.

   Once I switched to a dedicated desktop rather than my laptop these problems have disappeared.

3. Use the latest version of JMRI and keep up to date, since I started I’ve gone through a couple of versions of JMRI and it has gotten better as versions progress.
4. If you are going to use advanced consisting (CV19, 20, and 22) it’s probably a good idea to do your speed matching while your locomotive configured for an advanced consist. Digitrax, and possibly other manufactures, alter the BEMF behaviour in consist mode so a table that may work individually may not work the same in consist mode where it really matters.
5. You probably aren’t going to get a perfect match, even with identical locomotives with identical decoders and identical usage so expect a bit of push and pull between the locomotives. This happens with the prototype and so the point is to get close but you are just going to drive yourself mad if you try to get it perfect.